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The new production of the Mary Shelley's classic tale, on stage at the National Theatre, has created a mostly enthusiastic response from audience and critics alike. In fact, it is endowed with a power that absorbs and nearly overwhelms at times. Taking twenty years to make, via an uninterrupted creative exchange between the author of the script, Nick Dear, and Danny Boyle, the director, its appearance at this time brings powerfully to life, again, the universal, crucial themes of this profoundly charismatic tale. The production places at its centre the creature Frankenstein, as he has come to be popularly known, more than the creator, Viktor, the legitimate Frankenstein; from the beginning, a profound empathy is established with the creature. As he endures fatal injuries to the Self, we are powerfully guided to a reflection on the human struggle in the search for emotional and psychological existence. Mirroring, recognition, and belonging are clearly indicated (in the same way as in Shelley's creation) as the experiences which are missing for the creature to develop his humanity.
So, Frankenstein is back, and back with a vengeance. This latter theme, in fact, takes over the narrative more and more as the threat posed by the man made monster escalates, and, beyond what could be seen at times as an intergenerational conflict, a picture emerges of wider significance. The tragic pace and the ending, where Shelley's intentions are quite subverted, bring us to a place where issues of justice are left, as in classical tragedy, uncertain. The natural order defied by the scientist in his project is now a metaphor that perhaps brings us to the present: a confrontation to the death between the defeated ‘father’ and an irreconcilable, unbeatable ‘son’, locked together in a power struggle where political and moral issues fought on the global scene are echoed.